1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a system for immersing a user into a multi-dimensional collaborative environment using position tracking to adjust a position of a display displaying a 3D scene and/or other participants in the collaboration.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past a number of different technologies have been used to help people collaborate at a distance by coupling them together in some sort of common environment. These technologies have includes conference telephone systems, video telephones, networked head mounted displays, collaborative document software, etc. These technologies suffer from an inability to create a viable personal communications and computing environment for collaboration among individuals in part because the underlying sensor and display components are not used in a way that allows them to perform well enough to meet human factors needs. What is needed is a better such system.
For instance, video conferencing systems cannot provide true sight lines between participants, because the camera and display are in different positions. Therefore eye contact between participants is impossible. This problem has led to a very large number of attempted solutions over a period of three quarters of a century.
One class of solutions is to reduce the effects of imperfect sight lines by the use of other design elements, while another is to find ways to generate accurate sight lines. Accurate sight lines require dynamic tracking of the positions of the eyes of users, and generally require that the visual scene presented to each eye be digitally reconstructed to be of the correct perspective, since it is difficult to consistently place a physical camera at the correct position to capture the proper perspective. This approach is generally called tele-immersion. A tele-immersion example is Jaron Lanier's prototype described in the Scientific American article referenced. Several problems have made tele-immersion systems impractical. One is that displays and eye-position sensors that are currently available or are foreseen to be available in the near future do not work well outside of narrow tolerances for the position and orientation of the user's head. For instance, in order for participants to be able to be apparently placed close to each other in a shared virtual space, stereo vision must be supported, but for each eye to see a unique point of view, either some form of eyeware must be worn, or an autostereo display must be used, but available autostereo displays place restrictions on a user's head position. Because of these problems, it has been difficult to design tele-immersion systems that combine true sight lines, full duplex (meaning that users can see each other without problems due to intervening machinery such as stereo viewing glasses), and flexible virtual placement (meaning that viewers can be placed at any distance, near or far, and in any arrangement.) Another problem has been that tele-immersion systems have generally required dedicated rooms, which has limited their practicality. The physical layout of tele-immersion instrumentation has placed restrictions on the virtual layout of participants in the virtual space. The blue-c system generates true sight lines but places restrictions on relative placements of users in virtual space, cannot support high resolution sensing or display with currently available components, and requires dedicated rooms. The HP Coliseum system cannot support true sight lines and generalized placement of participants at the same time.